Misc.

You can’t defeat the Alt-Right without understanding why it came about.

When a Republican is wrong, it’s usually because he’s ignorant of some scientific or cultural concept. When a Democrat is wrong, it’s typically because he’s too elitist and dishonest to even CONSIDER an opposing point of view. Until the Alt-Right came along, Republicans tended to be humble, respectful, honorable people, whereas the Democrats would break every rule of decency, decorum, and principle just to suppress the other side and win.

The Alt-Right gained traction because a subset of Republicans were tired of watching their party behave respectfully and honorably, and then get treated like shit and lose over and over again. That’s why they call their fellow Republicans “cucks.” Mitt Romney’s loss was the final straw in this. They realized that in order to win any victories against the Democrats, they have to sink to their level. They have to be boisterous, aggressive, insulting, hypocritical, unprincipled and bigoted. Yes, that’s right: The Alt-Right is nothing more than a movement of Republicans who decided to deliberately start acting like Democrats.

The sad thing is, it worked. It helped the progressives win countless victories for decades, and now that same approach is winning victories for the Alt-Right. Now that Republicans have had a taste of victory, they’re going to keep doing this until the Democrats are completely beaten into humble submission. The Alt-Right will only stop when the Democrats are willing to admit that they’ve been the worst kind of assholes for over a century. The U.S. government was founded with limited, enumerated powers for a reason- to avoid sadistic group warfare via politics. If the Democrats are finally willing to learn that lesson, the Republicans would be happy to return to that type of system. But until the Democrats DO learn that lesson, the Republicans are now going to use the power of government to wage total war on the Democrats’ voter base. It’s up to the Democrats now to learn their lesson and end this war, or continue suffering crippling defeats.

So Democrats, what’s it going to be? Are you going to keep behaving like dishonest, elitist, entitled little shits, thereby feeding the Alt-Right? OR are you going to learn a more mature approach to dealing with political disagreement and learn to compromise and show respect for other people, draining the Alt-Right of their power?

Hillary is scarily corrupt, and the email leaks revealed that truth. She:

1. Used the DNC to rig the primary against Sanders.

2. Used her media allies to rig the Republican Primary IN FAVOR of Trump (thinking he couldn’t win the general).

3. Used her media allies to rig the election debates and get the questions in advance.

4. Deleted e-mails that were part of a criminal investigation against her.

5. Convinced the media to engage in mass hysteria about Russia, purely to distract from her own corruption and lies that were uncovered in those leaks.

If Hillary didn’t have so much corrupt control over the media, she would have been facing off against Rand Paul in the general election, and would have decisively lost. Instead, she stole the primary from him and handed it to Trump because she thought Trump would be an easier opponent.

Hillary engineered this entire election right down to the tiniest detail. She took away all of our better choices, and it all blew up in her face because she forgot about the electoral college. With that kind of control over the media, it would have been terrifying if she became president.

So if it was Russia who gave those e-mails to wikileaks, we should be giving Putin a fucking medal, not sanctions.

Stefan Molyneux’s central premise for some of his most abhorrent views is that the level of property rights in a society is determined by the IQ of its members, IQ is determined by genetics, and thus some races are genetically socialist.

This is wrong, not because I’m disputing his data, but because he’s got the causation backwards.

In reality, systems of property rights select for more intelligent people. Property rights evolve a population towards higher intelligence. Socialism works in the opposite direction. You can take a group from any culture or genetic line, put them into a libertarian minarchist system, and that group as a whole will become more successful. Their descendants will be more intelligent.

To illustrate this, all we have to do is look at how socialism and high intelligence come together in Academia. Or look at Chile or the UAE, both of which were dragged kicking and screaming into strong systems of property rights, and now are filled with successful, intelligent people.

This isn’t a difficult argument to understand. Yet, so many people assume the reverse causation because they’re looking to justify their own racist biases. If you so easily let yourself fall into that trap of collectivist thinking, you are not thinking of people as individuals, each with an individual right to liberty, and you are therefore NOT a libertarian.

Post 2

Here’s why I’m on the warpath against Stefan Molyneux:

He represents everything that is wrong with anarchocapitalism, acting as a sinister pied piper, who leads people away from libertarianism into alt-right nationalism. He is the leak between these two philosophies.

Anarchocapitalists believe that property rights are great, but no entity has a right to force anyone else into a system for the protection of those property rights. So if you can’t force people to abide by property rights, how can you create a population that respects property rights? You have to teach people. But when most people reject your philosophy, what do you do? Do you reevaluate your philosophy and try to understand WHY even the most die-hard libertarians most often reject anarchocapitalism? NO, that would require too much honesty and self-reflection. Instead, you blame their stupidity for their failure to “get it.” Stroking your own ego, you think to yourself, “If only people were smarter. Then we’d have an anarchocapitalist society.”

And that right there is the pathway to eugenics, where you try to filter out or eliminate the “stupid people” in the hopes that it will make people think more like you. If you’re like Molyneux or Trump, you start looking for factors that correlate with IQ (here, we’re just going to ignore the fact that IQ is a shitty measure of true intelligence). Causation doesn’t matter. Only correlation matters. You start racially profiling. It doesn’t matter how many innocent people are harmed, because at least the society, on average, is being made smarter. So as we weed out the inferior groups of people, we’re making our society more anarchocapitalist, right?

So how can we be libertarians without being led down this dark path towards genocidal fascism? We apply just a little bit of force way back at the beginning of this diatribe, compelling people to obey the laws necessary to enforce property rights. We don’t need to engage in social engineering or genocide when we admit to ourselves that there will always be people who disagree, no matter how intelligent they are, and this necessitates and justifies the use of force in defending property rights. Even then, we operate this enforcement on a legally-bound, individual basis, rather than engaging in any sort of profiling.

Minarchism is the only functional form of libertarianism. Anarchocapitalism, like anarchocommunism, is a gateway to all kinds of atrocities against liberty and humanity. And Stefan Molyneux is the gatekeeper.

The principle of human equality, the idea that all humans are equal in their individual rights to exert their will, provides the foundation for property rights. The concept of equal human rights came about during the Enlightenment Era when people realized that kings were not inherently superior to their peasants. Before that, kings decided all the rules of ownership and conduct. But when you accept the principle of human equality, then anyone may exert their will, so long as they do not infringe on another’s right to do the same.

This is the principle that we call “Liberty.”

Ownership comes from the idea that your will has physical manifestations in the world. Your own body is one of those physical manifestations, so you own yourself. Furthermore, you own any other physical manifestation of your will, so long as your are not infringing on the same right of anyone else.

Hence, “Private Property Rights” are the practical manifestation of the principle of Liberty.

But ultimately, in order to secure that principle of human equality, which necessarily implies Liberty, those principles must be encoded in law. That law must be superior to the will of any human. Otherwise, any human can overturn that principle.

This concept has historically been called the “Rule of Law.”

The Rule of Law is necessary to secure Liberty, and implies a specific body of law with jurisdictional enforcement powers. Hence, a system of Liberty necessarily requires a government. Anarchy precludes the Rule of Law, because in anarchy, there are no rulers, not even by those who seek to enforce the Rule of Law.

The Rule of Law alone is not sufficient to guarantee Liberty. The content of that body of laws matters, and must absolutely reflect the principles of human equal rights and Liberty, or tyranny will result.

So, beware of those who seek Anarchy, beware of those who pursue the Rule of Law without those laws being guided by the principles of Liberty, and beware of those who invoke equality while rejecting property rights. Each of these groups would destroy the protections that we seek from tyrannical leaders.

“Philosophical entropy” is the idea that the more ways there are for a person to be wrong, the more people will be wrong. When a multiple-choice question gets fewer right answers as more options are added, that’s one of the simplest forms of philosophical entropy. The existence of multiple differing political ideologies within a population is a more complicated example of philosophical entropy.

I call this concept “philosophical entropy” in quite the literal sense. Entropy is defined as the tendency for a system to occupy all accessible microstates, weighted by the difficulty of accessing each particular microstate. Physically, this means that any system comprised of particles that can each be in two possible microstates of equal energy will have half of its particles in one microstate and half in the other microstate.

If we borrow this concept from physics and apply it to philosophical epistemology, we can think of each belief system as a macroscopic statistical system. Each logical step or choice a person must make in order to construct that belief system is a microstate. Each logical step can either be right or wrong. Once a single incorrect logical step is made, the person’s entire belief system is built on faulty logic, and will be wrong unless they somehow correct that error through another counteracting error later. The more logical steps there are, the more chances a person has to end up wrong. In other words, while travelling down a pathway from axioms to ideological conclusions, the more different branches there are at which a person must choose a direction to travel, the more likely they will eventually choose a wrong path, and end up at the wrong ideological conclusions.

Thus, philosophical entropy suggests that if we assume that there is one right ideology, then the more wrong ideologies there are, the fewer people will be right. Ideological diversity is thus harmful to the ultimate goal of getting more people to be right, unless NOBODY has yet found the right answer.

Understandably, we liberty-minded folks are depressed about Rand Paul having to suspend his campaign in the Republican primary. He represented our best shot at reshaping the Republican Party in our image and having a liberty-minded president by 2017.

However, it’s important not to lose perspective. We may have lost this battle, but we’re still winning the war. We can still win this. Time is on our side.

The Trends

The United States is still trending libertarian. Not in policy, but in the opinions held by the majority of people. Trust in government has reached historic lows. New technologies and cultural phenomena, ranging from social media, to 3D printing, to Kickstarter, to Uber are continually decentralizing our society and empowering individuals to create and be heard. People have more powerful ways than ever before of becoming politically informed.

The evidence of the effect this decentralization has upon our society is evident in the difference between Rand Paul’s supporters and everyone else. Rand Paul’s supporters are some of the most vocal political advocates on social media. Paul has more Facebook likes than Cruz or Rubio, and he was a consistent winner in online polls not yet “adjusted” for demographics. In Iowa, Paul won 13% of the under-age-40 vote, but only 2% of everyone else. The divide here is clearly between the young and those too old to adjust to new technologies.

The Goal

The way in which Rand Paul was sidelined in the GOP primary makes it very clear that the Republican Party cannot be a vessel for anything radically new. This party is overwhelmingly dominated by the elderly, the hateful, and the out-of-touch. Indeed, Ted Cruz’s message appeals to their base more than Rand Paul’s because of how similar it is to Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric. The reason these two win in the Republican Party is the same reason they cannot win the general public. Remember, the goal is not to keep the Republicans in power, regardless of how badly they mistreat us! If the Republicans want our votes, they have to earn it by nominating a real libertarian, like Rand Paul. If Cruz becomes president, a real libertarian has no shot in that party until 2024 at the earliest!

For Liberty to truly succeed, we need to build a new coalition, not burdened by Republican baggage. Any attempt to compromise our values in order to gain more supporters will only be seen as “selling out.” The Democratic Party works because it is united around a single principle: Government should have an active role in improving our lives. We need to build a party round the principle that we’re better off when the government leaves us alone. There is an existing party that is united around this principle:

The Libertarian Party.

The Strategy

If the trends are ever in our favor, then why hasn’t the Libertarian Party even come close to winning a major election yet? Well, it’s because of the “lesser of two evils” hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that even if we agree with a 3rd party more, we always have to vote for one of the two major parties, because they’re the only ones who have a chance of winning, and it’s better to vote for the lesser evil than “throw away your vote” on a 3rd party. However, your odds of swinging an election between the two giants are astronomically small. For your vote for the Democrats or the Republicans to truly matter in a presidential election, you would have to live in a purple state, that purple state would have to swing on a single vote, and the electoral college would have to swing on that one state. Your vote truly doesn’t matter.

That is, unless you vote 3rd party. You see, 3rd parties desperately need each and every vote they can get. For the Libertarian Party, every vote has a significant chance of pushing them above the symbolic 1% threshold. Every vote pushes them ever closer to the 5% they would need to be included in the national debates. Every vote gives them a higher chance of being declared a “spoiler” for one of the two major parties.

But if we “spoil” the election, isn’t that a bad thing? Well that depends…is media attention a bad thing for a young, unknown political party trying to break out?

We can learn something from Donald Trump’s unexpected success. He broke out in the Republican primary by harnessing the “outrage factories” inherent in some of our new forms of media. By saying obviously outrageous things, he ensured that people rushing to express their hatred for him would dominate every single second of airtime in the political coverage around the country (and indeed, even around the world to some extent). When you’re trying to make a name in politics, as in show business, no publicity is bad publicity.

So here’s how we win:

Support the Libertarian Party.

The Libertarian Party starts looking like a spoiler in the polls.

The Republicans, outraged at their potential loss, complain about the Libertarian Party.

Stand strong! Give no ground! Let everyone know that the Liberty Coalition resides within the Libertarian Party. They can join it, but we’re not leaving it.

Impressed by the unshakable principles of the Libertarian Party, more than 5% of voters begin supporting them.

Mostly so the other parties can try to knock us down and steal our voters, the Libertarian Party is allowed in the national debates for the first time.

The major parties’ scheme backfires.

The Libertarian Party surpasses the Republicans in support.

A national political realignment occurs, in which voters are divided by whether they are libertarian or authoritarian, rather than “liberal” or “conservative.”

The Libertarian Party wins.

There’s no telling how much of this can be accomplished within the time frame of a single election campaign. But no matter how long it takes, remember that our movement is a growing flame, and we can no longer be ignored. As said by Mahatma Gandhi:

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.